Читать книгу Charlie McKelvey Mysteries 3-Book Bundle - C.B. Forrest - Страница 10

May 28, 1993. Sector West, Croatia.

Dear Kit... The APC broke down again this morning and Danny spent half the day tying the fuel pump together with wire. He’s a wizard under the hood, which you have to be with some of the equipment we got. The tracks belong in the war museum! Whenever anyone in the platoon has a problem, they send for Danny. He jokes he’ll be good enough to get his mechanics papers when he gets back to civvie street.

So we had a day around camp instead of going on patrol, which was a nice break. Peacekeeping is a lot different here on the ground than the politicians think. Neither side trusts the other, and they sure as hell don’t trust the UN to protect them. Our platoon commander says that’s because other UN battalions haven’t done their job. Some of the third world ones are so poorly paid they take bribes from both sides and turn a blind eye when Serbs or Croats sneak weapons in or cleanse a village or whatever. Besides even when we find weapons, all we’re supposed to do is turn them over to the local police, who probably hid them in the first place.

Don’t get the Hammer started on the UN rules, because the bureaucrats have no idea how the militias, the police, and the locals are in it together. Both sides trust their own militias way more than they do UNPROFOR or any fancy ceasefire plan dreamed up in Zagreb. And each local militia’s got its own commander who thinks he’s the boss and he doesn’t have to obey orders from his own command, let alone us. So every day we catch guys sneaking behind the lines to lay mines, and every night the two sides shell each other back and forth over our heads.

Anyway, the strategy of our battalion CO is to try to get the locals to trust us by building relationships with them, and helping them fix up their homes and roads after the bombings. Our section house is near a little village that used to be Serb but now it’s Croat, although there are two Muslim refugee families, like Mahir who escaped from Sarajevo with his mother. Sarge has kind of taken her and Mahir under our wing. The kid’s only fifteen, but he wants to practice his English so he does our translating. He hates the Serbs. He says when the Serbs ran away from the village, they burned their houses so the Croats couldn’t use them. But I’m not sure, I think maybe the Croats torched the village to chase the Serbs away.

Lots of our guys think the whole place is just nuts, but I’m trying to learn how all this started. It’s hundreds of years old and each side accuses the other of atrocities. The Serbs hate the Croats for collaborating with the Nazis to massacre thousands of them. The Croats say the Serbs took over their land and were the enforcers under the communists. And both of them have hated the Muslims since the Turks massacred and looted their way through the area during the Ottoman Empire. Five hundred fucking years ago, for crissakes. Nobody forgets.

I have to say it makes Canada look like heaven on earth. Most of our guys can’t believe the bitterness, even between neighbours who’ve known each other for generations. So like I said, we’re trying to get them to trust us at least. The Hammer thinks we have enough to do without wasting our time playing Pollyanna, but then he’s the guy who has to argue with both sides each time they try to show their muscle. But Sarge got our section to build a soccer field and a jungle gym for the school in the village, and it’s really great to watch the kids run around laughing. Like there’s not mines all around the town perimeter and mortar fire in the distance all night. The Sarge thinks kids are where we can make a difference.

* * *

Twiggy hung up the phone in frustration and turned to scan the street. There was no one nearby, no one watching her. No one remotely interested in a fat old bag lady standing near the corner of Bank and Wellington Streets, almost in the shadow of the Confederation Building on Parliament Hill, an area probably crisscrossed with so many security cameras that no one would dare do her harm. The phone booth was well chosen from that point of view, although the voice at the other end of the phone had been almost drowned out by the roar of traffic, not to mention the damn bells of the Peace Tower.

She’d used up half a day’s worth of quarters making the long distance call to Petawawa, only to have the stupid twit on the phone say she’d have to check with her boss. Who wasn’t in, of course. Where were these politicos when you really needed them? Out on the campaign trail, kissing babies at Easter parades and shoving party pamphlets into distrustful farmers’ hands.

Preaching about peace, honour and returning Canada to its respected place on the world stage. If she had a loonie for every ounce of sanctimonious crap those guys dished up...

It almost made Twiggy want to go with the Ottawa Sun guy. To stand for something right in this me-first-and-only world. But she was part of that world, which had never done her any favours when she’d tried to live by a higher code. So why the hell shouldn’t she put herself first too? In the end, money was all that counted, and whoever was willing to come through was going to get her story.

But both sides were playing coy. Both had listened to her pitch and said they were interested, but they’d have to get back to her. Which cost her time and money every time she had to trek to the phone booth. Both had tried to get something for free too. Tried to find out who she was, where she was calling from, exactly what she thought she’d seen. Well, she could play coy too, and they weren’t getting a thing until she had something to show for it in return.

She did wonder how much they could tell on their own. Could they identify the telephone booth? Were they recording the calls and analyzing every sound to figure out who she was and where she was calling from? Did they have that fancy equipment the CSI used on that cop show on TV ? Naw, she decided. One was just a cheap tabloid hack, and the other a political wannabe from a two-bit country riding up the Ottawa Valley.

She hobbled slowly across the street, dragging her garbage bag as she headed towards Tim Hortons. Thinking about cops gave her a momentary twinge of guilt. Mr. G had always been good to her; she knew he’d been genuinely freaked out when her boys were killed, and he’d shown a lot more heart than the rest of the cops and doctors and lawyers she’d met in the last six years. He was one of the good guys. There wasn’t really a single person alive on this planet that she gave a damn about any more, but Mr. G came close. By rights, he deserved this information, so that he could do something good with it. Get a surveillance team, search warrant, wire tap, whatever cops did to lay their trap and catch the bad guy. Before the creep had a chance to cover his tracks.

She worried over this unaccustomed moral dilemma for the five minutes it took her to reach the Tim Hortons. Was there a way she could let him know, and still get her money? Something anonymous, maybe, that couldn’t be traced back to her?

Worth thinking about, anyway.

* * *

Holding two plates aloft, Anne Norrich pirouetted through the kitchen door and bumped it shut behind her with her hip. Her eyes shone, and her face was flushed a hot pink to match her floral blouse.

“Ready?” she challenged.

Green steeled himself and nodded. A plate descended before him, and it took him a moment to recognize the apparition sprawled across it. He had prepared himself for scaly skin, even a fish head with shrivelled eyes, but this was far worse. A speckled red missile with beady eyes, long bony appendages, lethal claws and worst of all, feelers which draped either side of the plate and came to rest in the mashed potatoes. Green was transfixed with horror.

Norrich roared with laughter. “You should see the look on his face, Annie!”

Alarm flitted across Anne’s face. “Have you ever eaten one?”

He managed to shake his head, his voice still somewhere in the pit of his stomach.

“Well,” said Norrich, “you haven’t lived until you’ve had an honest to God Nova Scotian lobster. Steamed in ocean brine, no spices or fancy sauces. Just a bowl of lemon and melted butter to dip it in.” He lifted the bottle of wine which sat at his side and held it across the table towards Green. “Here, I think you need a good dose of extra courage. Then you won’t notice how hard it is to get any food out of the horny bastards.”

They’d started the evening with scotch and were now well into their second bottle of wine. Since Green’s idea of tying one on was a second beer with his smoked meat platter at Nate’s Deli, he was already seeing double. Perhaps there weren’t quite as many legs as there seemed to be, he thought in a brief lucid moment, but nonetheless he held out his glass gratefully. It was the only way he was going to get through this course.

Green was not much of an observant Jew, particularly where the Kosher laws were concerned, and he loved his Chinese shrimp and barbequed pork as much as the next Jew, but he thought the rabbis were on the right track in forbidding this menace. A vision of Woody Allen chasing the lobster around the kitchen in the movie Annie Hall popped into his mind, and he almost choked on his healthy slug of wine.

Anne was a solicitous hostess and fluttered around tying his bib and showing him how to crack open the shell to extract the meat. When the head and some green insides spilled out onto the white lace tablecloth, she spirited them miraculously from view. With no feelers and beady eyes to contend with, he was able to concentrate on getting some nourishment.

As he struggled, Norrich regaled him with stories about growing up in a remote fishing village, where his father had been the only RCMP presence in town. The man grew to be a legend over the course of the lobster. After Norrich had popped the cork on the third bottle, Green decided he’d better steer the conversation to the case before they both sank into a stupor. He had spent part of the afternoon reading Norrich’s reports on his visit to Daniel Oliver’s reserve unit and had been unable to glean a single useful fact about the man. Not only was there no mention of a possible connection to Ian MacDonald’s death, but there was no hint that Norrich had even asked about it. Surely there were tidbits Norrich had picked up that he’d chosen to leave out of his official reports.

Green couldn’t think clearly enough to be subtle, so he plunged straight in. “I saw from the reports that you went out to the West Nova Scotia Regiment to ask about Daniel Oliver. Did you find out anything about his peacekeeping tour?”

Norrich blinked and stared at the table cloth as if trying to remember where he was. “No, it was just a routine inquiry. ‘Did he have any enemies? Did he mention any conflicts?’ That kind of thing. But since Oliver had left the reserves a year earlier, they’d pretty much lost touch with him. Waste of time from the investigation’s point of view, but I met a great group of guys.”

“Did you speak with any of his overseas mates?”

“No, but none of the regiment was overseas with him. He’d served with a battalion from the Princess Pats which was based in Winnipeg, but it had reservists from all across the country.”

“What about his friend Ian MacDonald?”

“Ian who?”

“MacDonald. Served with him in Croatia. He was killed two years after coming home. He was in the same reserve outfit. Did you ask about him?”

Norrich peered at him balefully. Despite the haze of booze, he obviously sensed the implied rebuke in Green’s tone. “Don’t see how the hell that was relevant.”

Which means you didn’t even ask, asshole, Green thought. He forced himself to take a deep breath. “Why did Daniel Oliver leave the reserves?”

Norrich picked up a claw and splintered it with vigour. “He developed a serious attitude problem. He picked fights with friends, said none of them knew what the hell being in the army was all about. He was disrespectful of superior officers, derelict in his duties. The way the fellows on the base talked, if he hadn’t left, he might have been in for some disciplinary action. He was becoming a disgrace to the uniform.”

Green filtered his thoughts through his anger, trying for some tact. “I know a few guys who served with the UN police in Yugoslavia, and they had some trouble readjusting when they came back. And we know from highly publicized cases like Romeo Dallaire that a lot of soldiers encountered situations overseas that haunted them when they came back. Didn’t Oliver’s behaviour ring any alarm bells with his regiment?”

Norrich slapped the table impatiently. His plate jumped, and his cuff came to rest in a pool of grease. Wordlessly Anne jumped up, rescued both men’s plates and disappeared into the kitchen. “I think all this stress stuff is a load of horseshit. It’s their job, for Christ’s sake! It’s why they signed up, and if they don’t have the stomach for it, they should just pack up and leave the job to the men who do. Last thing a soldier needs, just like a cop, is a mate who freezes up under fire and secondguesses whether he should act. It’s an insult to all the brave men who’ve ever served their country to pander to these guys and offer excuses. Worse, it makes them doubt themselves. Makes them wonder if they’ve got what it takes to be a hero when the shit hits the fan. A soldier, just like you and me, has to act. Not analyze or feel or whatever other lily shit the shrinks have come up with for our own good.”

His jowls quivered, and he had turned a dangerous purple. In the kitchen, Green heard dishes clattering, and he wondered if Anne was deliberately staying out of her husband’s way. His own very personal outrage threatened to overpower him, and he debated the wisdom of continuing, but in defence of all the police officers and emergency workers he’d known, he tried to find a dispassionate response.

“No one questions their heroism or their ability to act when they need to. But with the guys I knew, it was the aftermath that was tricky. When they had time to think—”

Norrich slapped the table again. “The problem is Canadians are soft! We haven’t had a war on our own soil in nearly two hundred years, and two generations have grown up never feeling the threat of any war. We’ve pampered them at home and at school. Car pools and after-four programs, and when they grow up, welfare and unemployment insurance and health care. What the hell’s left to fight for? So when trouble hits, there’s no backbone. Hell, most of the world sees more trauma—”

The kitchen door burst open, and Anne came out carrying a massive platter mounded with lemon meringue pie. She had a determined smile on her face, but her eyes glittered with warning.

“Enough shop talk, gentlemen. You wouldn’t want a good pie to go to waste in the heat of discussions. Mike, would you like some tea? Or coffee perhaps?”

Green seized on the latter offer with gratitude. A dull ache was beginning to replace the spinning inside his skull. While they had coffee and dessert, Anne skilfully steered the conversation to harmless realms. Although Norrich continued to sputter and huff, his colour gradually returned to a dull pink. As soon as he could respectably do so, Green rose to say his goodbyes.

Norrich had been drooping over his Bailey’s, and he lifted his head in surprise. “Here, I’ll drive you.”

Fortunately he seemed to have exhausted all spirit of argument, for he accepted Green’s hasty refusal and merely propped himself in the doorway to wave goodbye as Green climbed into a cab. Cruising through the neat, tree-lined suburbs towards downtown, Green drew a deep, cleansing breath and glanced at his watch. Just past ten o’clock. There was nothing to do in his hotel room except go to bed, but it was too early, especially with his biological clock still set on Ottawa time.

Part of him longed to curl up in a warm bed and phone home, but Sharon would still be out at work, and a conversation with Hannah would last all of two minutes. Besides, another part of him was restless. Ill at ease. More disturbed by Norrich’s passionate accusations than he cared to admit. Norrich was the last person who would have noticed any troubling undercurrents between the soldiers who were the pride of the nation. Green didn’t relish more alcohol or more conversations with drunks, but there were places to visit and questions to ask that could only be done at night. He fished out Kate McGrath’s business card and punched in her cellphone.

“Kate? How would you like to meet me for a drink? Dress for the trenches. I hear the Lighthouse Tavern is a rough place.”